Posts Tagged ‘pasta’

This is the recipe I was going to share with you yesterday. However, while sweating my ass off last night:

Yeah, that’s not a glow. That’s sweat.

(The fact that a panting dog decided that even in 100 degree weather it was appropriate to sit ON ME didn’t help.)

Where was I? Other than sweating? Oh, right, I was going to tell you about the pasta. The thing is, the magic of the pasta was the jalepeno noodles themselves along with the watochi I got from the farmers market. The watochi is a weird watermelon based salsa thing, which is fab, but honestly? Without those two things? You’d have a very hard time replicating the pasta. So, I basically made a sauce with the watochi, some chicken stock, and some water, then added some ground ginger and salt, and poached/sauteed the shrimp in it, then stirred in the cooked noodles and some thai basil. It was SUPER good, so if you find a watermelon based salsa, I recommend throwing together something similar!

I had it with some Basa Ruedo Blanco, which is one of my absolute favorites. It’s a Spanish white and it’s very bright – tangy, almost. If anything was going to make me forget the 100 degree weather, it’s Basa.

Nothing will make me forget the 100 degree weather.

While we ate it, Crockett tried to prevent the hops from taking over the world.

Thursday morning (wow, this post is seriously belated), Crockett got up to run with me before leaving. He’s pretty fit, and I ran faster than I probably would have otherwise.

Plus, his charming attitude really made my day.

Ok, fine, I probably wouldn’t have wanted my picture taken at that point either.

While he was packing his suitcase, I packed this little bowl o’ tasty for my lunch:

It’s fresh basil, chopped tomatoes, chickpeas, and water packed mozzarella drizzled with balsamic vinegar and a smidge of olive oil. And TONS of salt added at eating time. I’m learning to love raw tomatoes, but only when they’re salted to within an inch of their lives.

Also, if the hops plant doesn’t take over the world, the three basil plants we have will.

I packed up and left him to get himself to the airport, which meant leaving his car at a nearby park and ride.

So my mom took me to pick it up ON HER SCOOTER.

This is the first time I’d been on a scooter. Does my face look like an ‘oh shit’ face? It’s not, I swear. Or if it is it’s because I was pretty sure I was going to drop my phone into the intersection. The scooter was super fun and my mom is a stable driver.

Anyway, now Crockett’s gone again and I’m back to being boring.

Except this bowl of boring was accentuated with a metric ton of raspberries and wasn’t really boring at all.

My sushi lunch (Sushi Hana, in Longmont), actually was kind of boring. The salmon was SUPER fatty, which I think is supposed to be a good thing (gosh I know so much about sushi), but sort of muted the flavor. Oh well, for $9.50 I think this was a pretty screamin’ deal.

To summarize: watochi, skinny salmon, and earth destroying plants. Make of it what you will.

I know everyone else is hot too – what do you do, other than lay in your basement and sweat, to deal with it?

I don’t go to the Louisville farmers market as often as I intend to – which is every week. And then every Saturday it’s like noon, and I convince myself that the good stuff is probably all gone, and I skip it. It’s ridiculous. However, today I was up at 7 to do my chores and walk the dogs.

And almost seriously mess up my breakfast.

I was boiling water for coffee with one hand and mixing up my strawberries and Kashi with the other. When the water came to a boil it was also time to add the yogurt to the cereal, and I came thisclose to pouring the water on the cereal. (The photo above is a dramatic reenactment. I’ve always wanted to do one of those.)

Then I turned some jeans I never wear into shorter-than-I-meant-for-them-to-be jean shorts, and took the girls for a walk.

Sadly, even though it was only 8 or so, it was already really hot for the girls.

We stopped in every available piece of shade and lounged.

I can’t decide if I’m more entertained by her wiggling around on her back or her being so white that it’s almost impossible to take a picture of her outdoors.

When we got home, Maida got herself into this position and Cloey found a similar one on the tile floor of the bathroom. I swear that I didn’t put the sheet over her, she managed that all on her own. With the girls taken care of, I took off for the farmers market.

I’m always surprised by how big our market is, for a town of 20,000 people. There’s a huge produce stand behind where I’m standing here, and the booths go all the way down the block and around the corner. One of the reasons that I don’t always make it is because I’m not a big fan of dirty vegetables. I know, I know, I would like to support local farmers. Is it too much to ask that they clean off all the earwigs first?

(Yes, I know that’s too much to ask. That’s why I don’t ask them!)

Pappardelle’s pasta stand is ENORMOUS and conveniently earwig free. I spent ten minutes staring at pasta types – it’s kind of a mental switch to think of pasta as something other than a blank slate.

After picking up my pasta, I swung by the stand with the largest line – Palisade Peaches!!

Look, I’ve never had a peach from Georgia. All I know is that a fresh Western slope Colorado peach is a beauty to behold. I intend on eating this whole bag this weekend.

Then I saw a place called Soljuice, which is new (to me, at least). I asked the woman taking orders if they had a storefront anywhere, and she said they basically only exist at this particular farmers market. They were using a juice extractor rather than a juicer – my understanding of the difference, as she explained it, is that a juicer that uses centrifugal force can damage the goodness in the plant cells. The other difference is that the juice extractor the booth was using took approximately four minutes to make 12 ounces of juice. I ordered The Green and popped over to Paul’s Coffee, the next booth, to grab a pound of the beans Crockett and I like.

Turns out buying beans got me a free iced coffee – and who am I to say no? Even balancing two drinks, I managed to visit a couple more booths. One, where I took the above picture, was selling very pretty macarons! I bought two, because, come on. Macarons.

The other was selling (and giving tastes of) wine.

I tried a sip of two different whites and a red. It was good but all very uncomplicated – there was no unfolding of flavors of any kind. That’s ok from a four dollar bottle, but these are 13 – 15 dollars each, so I passed. It’s possible that the heat and the time of day were effecting my taste buds, but either way I didn’t feel like splurging.

My haul: coffee, a lavender and dark chocolate macaron, a salted caramel macaron, my peaches, some green jalapeno pasta that I intend to use with some shrimp when Crockett comes back, and this sauce called Watochi from a company called Two Mile Creek. I tried it at the booth – the guy was awesome and the sauce is super wacky. It’s a watermelon base, with chipotle and tomatoes and all kinds of good stuff. They also had pepper jellies, which I love, but they all included bell peppers and I opted not to have an allergic reaction in the middle of the market.

I’m going through a whole scheduling thing with school and work right now. Today, though, was all about school – I left the house at 8 am and didn’t roll in until close to 7 tonight.

To fuel the day, I made a spinachy smoothie. I started with oats, milk, cottage cheese, and spinach…

and added frozen blueberries and bananas.

I think my lil smoothie blender, despite being less than six months old, is on it’s last legs. Perhaps I’ve been asking too much of it.

Ok, fine, perhaps I’m not totally done playing around with my new camera.

See how Mines did the M and then Golden High School, above, got all copycatty with the G? The M is way better.

When I was getting all excited about my spinach smoothie I was forgetting about lunch…. so I had to buy a crappy salad from the lunch place on campus. It was crappy. The meat you see in the corner was two kinds – one that looked like ham and one that looked like turkey.

They tasted exactly the same.

That’s never a good sign.

When I got home, Crockett suggested that we perhaps needed someone to make food for us.

This is one of the reasons I find him irresistible.

What is food without an Old Fashioned (him) and a Super Tuscan?

We went to a local italian place called Zucca that we almost never go. The wine, fantastic. The cocktail, mediocre – so I heard.

They had two specials, and instead of going all nuts we just shared both of them. First, a non traditional minestrone. It lacked beans and pasta, hence the non trad.

The lack of included carbs made it all the more ideal for soaking up with bread.

The second dish was a pasta that honestly I didn’t really listen to the description of. If pressed, I’d say it was a creamy puttanesca with sauteed mushrooms, grilled chicken, and fresh spinach. Hopefully, no one will press, because I’m pretty sure I’m missing at least one key adjective. However, it was damn tasty.

Now my stomach sort of hurts, because that was a lot of acid for one meal.

Crockett went skiing for the second day in a row (and the second time this season) yesterday, and I didn’t get up until 9:30.

9:30.

I never sleep that late, especially not when I’m alone. Fortunately I’d put my 1/4 cup stone ground oats in 1/2 cup of water and stuck them in the fridge before going to bed, so I was a lot closer to breakfast than I would otherwise have been. I added 1/2 cup of milk and 1/2 cup of pumpkin when cooking it up and it came out delicious and creamy. If only I had the presence of mind to soak my oats every night.

Ha. Soak my oats.

It was still missing something though. Something tangy…

Cranberry sauce. (Not to be confused with my cranberry chutney. Chutney on oatmeal would be a taste sensation, certainly, although probably not a good one.)

After breakfast I started folding clothes, and my goofy girls started hiding their toys in said clothes. After finding the footless (not to be confused with footloose) squirrel for the fourth time, I gave up and took them for a walk.

Cloey found herself a gigantic stick and followed me around with it, whacking me in the legs and not even apologizing.

When Crockett got home from skiing, we had date night.

Whhhooo hoooo date night!

We found Tutti with this little method we like to call wandering-down-the-street. It’s in a neighboring town, Lafayette, and has apparently been around for a little less than a year.

The first thing we noticed was that the furniture is all patio furniture, and there’s a lot of it in a very small room.

The second thing we noticed was the nifty sizing. Each menu item comes in three sizes – wine in 3 oz glasses, 6 oz glasses, and bottles, and beer in 8 oz, pint, and 22 oz glasses. The food comes in saucer/cup, plate/bowl, and platter. They describe it as ‘tasting’, ‘dinner’, and ‘to share’.

We ordered two tasting plates, a dinner plate, a pint of Deschutes Mirror Pond (Crockett), and a 3 oz glass of Elsa Bianchi Chardonnay (so-so).

Through the meal, I had two more little glasses of wine – Crusher Viognier (two thumbs up) and Morse Code Shiraz (good but poorly chosen with my food). I wish every restaurant in the world served half glasses. I got to try three kinds of wine and only drink (and pay for… ok, Crockett paid) a glass and half.

I chose the tasting sizes. First, I ordered carrot and parsnip ‘pasta’ with seared tofu in a lemongrass and ginger broth. It was good (and vegan), but the broth being made with soymilk added sort of a strange sweetness. I would have preferred it to be not creamy at all or to be made with actual milk. The carrot pasta was fun though, and there was a lot of ?spinach? making me feel all healthy and stuff.

My second tasting plate was baked puttanesca. Awesome.

Plus? I got to tell Crockett than puttanesca is named for whores. Spicy, spicy whores.

Crockett ordered a plate of scallops with butternut squash risotto.

I have no idea where the squash was, but man alive did it not matter in the least. I could have lived without the scallops. Hell, I could have lived without everything else on the table, if I’d just had more of this risotto. Because. Yum.

Overall, Tutti was fun. If we lived down the street I could see going there quite a bit – since it’s a 15 minute drive and we have Boulder in that radius as well, I don’t know how soon we’ll go back.

Then? My Christmas tree went up in record time.

Ok, fine. It’s fake, and I leave the decorations on all year round. All I have to do is bring it in from the garage and plug it in.

There is no good way to photograph cold pesto pasta chicken salad with an iPhone, but I gave it my best shot because it was damn tasty. Those wacky looking noodles are ripped up lasagne, cause that’s what I had. I prefer to think of it as ‘rustic’ (not ‘underprepared’).

Drinks- I had wine, whiskey, club soda, and a variety of fruit and fruit syrup available. Mine was wine, soda, cherry syrup, and preserved cherries. I have no idea what Crockett’s was, but it was very pretty, which is exactly what he was going for, I’m completely sure.